#darby cox

[compassion-scad]

Okay, so this weekend I went to Counterpoint music festival outside of ATL, and the music was of course amazing, but there were so many points where I was like, " Wow, you really should have designed this service better". The check in process is entirely run by volunteers, which is understandable because it's cost-effective, but there seemed to be no set rules in place. Cars were driving every which way, (which held up traffic because there would occasionally be a spare car going down a one-way incorrectly) and the staff was trying to funnel hundreds of people down a tiny road with no signage and no system of parking. So this led to us being stuck on a mile-long road for almost an hour. If this wasn't bad enough, everyone was all festival crazy, so people kept getting out of their cars, leaving them running, and wandering off, so when the line started moving again, you would have to wait for the crazies to realize, wander back, and move their vehicles.  I thought that improved signage could have helped this, they could have also assigned check-in times, so that the place wasn't flooded when everyone and their mother wanted to check in at the same time. They also could have stationed employees along the drive so there wasn't the issue of folks wandering off, there were at least a dozen simple, easy to implement ideas that could have resolved the whole check in process to make everything smoother.

[compassion-scad]

Stumbled across these two images. The first is someones project on their definition of service design. I found this to be nicely illustrated. The second is a helpful way on how to organize and layout personas for your presentations. I personally struggled with creating a though persona for our last project, so I'll keep this in the back of my mind for the next persona I have to create. I also enjoyed the way they laid out their info graphic, it is clear and easy to follow. Hope this helps some of you!

[compassion-scad]

Bruce Claxton Lecture:

I attended the Bruce Claxton yesterday, and was delighted to recognize some of the design thinking techniques he mentioned as the ones that we had just learned about in SERV 216. Some things that I took from his lecture that I thought were important to know was his spiel on passion. If you aren't passionate about it, then there isn't any reason for anyone to be passionate about it---and it's probably not worth it.

I also liked when he talked about knowing what rules to break, and how design is about breaking the rules. I was struck by "inspired leaders work from the inside out", and how the design mindset is now shirting from the outside in, to the inside out. I think this is especially important to remember as we need to remember to design and create with the end user in mind, perhaps even co-creating with the end-user for the best possible product.

[compassion-scad]

The Struggle to locate the Children's Museum

So locating the children's museum turned out to be far more difficult than we (team blue) could have imagined.  I (darby) parked next to eichberg hall, next to what I thought was the entrance to the tricentennial museums. From there, I went through a series of hallways, with no signage, until I finally found an employee who directed me the children's museum was "down the hall, to the left".  However, this actually meant that I had to exit the part of the museum I was in, cross the street, and find a poorly marked giftshop. From the giftshop (pictured above), our group walked outside and noticed the very tiny children's museum sign (pictured above). However, we had to walk through a good portion of the train museum to find the children's museum, and there was absolutely no signage except for that little sign, and the sign beside the gate when we finally reached the children's museum (exploration station).  The very first picture is where the children's museum portion is located (see the blue supports). You have to walk behind the two trains that completely block the entrance from sight, and then enter a code to get inside of the exploration station. All in all, this experience could be greatly improved with a few more signs, or a more detailed map! (We were given a map upon leaving the gift shop, but since you can't see the children's museum until you are there, it was quite difficult to understand the map and navigate our way).